When a source document is in multiple languages/ancient form of language/alternative script version of a language/follow an alternative orthography/written in another language, it is useful to read the source and a translated-transliterated-modernized version of the text side-by-side, or sometimes even line-by-line.

Some wiki try to solve the problem by hard-coding source document into different alternative version of a page, and/or having multiple versions of same text inside same page, and that create additional problem of verifiability

Who would benefit: all wikisource users

Proposed solution: Create an interface that can allow the display of two (or more) different text from same (or different) wikisource side by side, either by arrangement by editor or by selection by users.

@Jc86035: But this is for readers. I mentioned editors because in some cases automatic matching might not work so well and need editor to match and align those documents. C933103 (talk) 20:55, 4 November 2018 (UTC)

@Candalua: I see, that is useful, however there are some limitations to the script that wouldn't cut it when it come to achieving what I want to do:

It requires the user to manually select which international language version would show up, instead of showing a specific language version by default (For instance for a English-French bilingual document, you would want to default it to showing English side by side with French)

It seems like there is an upper limit of displaying up to two documents at a time and cannot display three or four of them together at the same time.

It simply show two different pages side by side, and do not support line-be-line alignment of content of two document.

It seems like the UI is limited to showing documents with interlanguage link and cannot be used to show e.g. alternative version of the document in same wiki.

Point 4 can be done with a template that emulates interwikis, such as this plus a local script to load the link. Point 3 is a difficult task, that can probably be achieved only by putting line or position markers into every text so that markers can be matched side-by-side. But points 1 & 2 look feasible. It would be great to have such a functionality available by default. --Candalua (talk) 08:47, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

For point 3, it would only need to put those markers into relevant texts that are desired to have such effect, instead of literally every text. The reason why I am requesting this is that from what I see there are already some different texts on wikisources that have different versions of the same document aligned on the same page line by line using various different layouts. I think it would be easier to handle both as someone who would edit wikisource and also to people who want to copy thing from wikisource if they're separately stored in different pages and then display together than mixing all different versions together within same page. C933103 (talk) 11:35, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

Support I also dream about this tool, but I think it will be difficult to match line by line, this may require machine learning tool (word2vec or fastText). Patrice Dargenton (talk) 11:19, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

Support there is already a lot of tools doing more or less this (I use mw:Extension:DoubleWiki a lot), but none is perfect and we need one well-thought and well-supported tool, VIGNERON * discut. 12:28, 18 November 2018 (UTC)